


Carve a Pomegranate

by thumbipeach



Series: Falling from the Fig Tree (Greek Myth AU) [1]
Category: Ancient Greek Religion & Lore, Purple Hyacinth (Webcomic)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Gods & Goddesses, Belladonna is Hecate, Death, DeathGod!Kieran, F/M, Flower Symbolism, Greek myth AU, Hades and Persephone AU, I did it for me, LIKE WAY TOO GODDAMN MUCH, Language of Flowers, Life - Freeform, Oh My God, Pomegranates, SO SORRY, SpringGoddess!Lauren, Symbolism, Tristan is Demeter, are you tired of my obsession with flower motifs yet, because they’ll keep coming, i don’t know how to possibly tag this POS, idiot!Kieran, idiot!Lauren, is it even Greek myth AU if there aren’t commas after every word??, me shouting: WHAT THE FUCK, nobody asked for this but I am delivering anyways, once again I apologize I have no clue what this is, shut me up 2: Electric Boogaloo, unnecessary commas abound, why did i do this, wow I really am a clown arent I, yeah I’m sorry I don’t know either, yeah more like, yeah theres fruit too did I mention?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-07
Updated: 2020-06-07
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:21:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24596686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thumbipeach/pseuds/thumbipeach
Summary: Thrash it, twist it, set it ablaze and feed on its fruit.But do it with another, for there are two sides that bear seeds.—Or: they both cannot hide things from each other, because Life and Death do not deceive when it comes to what they take.(Lauki Hades and Persephone AU)
Relationships: Lauren Sinclair/Kieran White
Series: Falling from the Fig Tree (Greek Myth AU) [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1793035
Comments: 6
Kudos: 64





	Carve a Pomegranate

**Author's Note:**

> Song to listen to: ‘Rhiannon’ by Fleetwood Mac

_1\. Commence_

  
  


She thinks he looks too young for one so old.

He’s clad in an obsidian chiton, all silver thread and black fabric like the night, stars dotting the fringe like pearls. His form is all hard edge, muscle, like the Fates had taken to him with a chisel and brimstone and cut into him, creating deceptive angles that led down to a youthful physique. 

But his eyes gave him away to her at once, the daisy blooming in the back corner while he pours a cup of rose water for himself. Those eyes, they are the cerulean of the ocean, sharp and calculating and too knowing, too invasive for the young god she took him to be at first glance. Lord Death is not young, she reasons—he is Time itself.

She does not make a move towards him, though something in her feet tells her she wants to.

They lock eyes behind the climbing pillar. 

She darts back, leaving daisies in her wake. 

He does not follow.

———

He thinks she looks too sad, too angry, even, for one born of flowers.

She dons a white peplos underneath her himaton, one of a burnt umber color that offsets the crimson shine to her hair. Daisies and freesias sprout around where she thinks she’s hidden behind the pillar, flute of ambrosia in her fist and a curious look in her molten amber eyes, which scrutinize the area around her like ones of a hawk rather than a deer, like he’d expected of Lady Spring.

He does not make to introduce himself, though a small fragment inside his head beckons him to see her reaction if he made the petals around her wilt by his attention.

They lock eyes behind the climbing pillar.

He stares her down, and she disappears, with lone daisies fluttering behind his eyelids.

She does not return.

  
  
  
  
  


_2\. Spring_

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


She’s in her garden, tending to her gladioli, all soft cream and orange, when a presence makes itself known in the far recesses of the plot, where she grows her hyacinths, all sorts. 

Pausing her work and running to the other end, she finds him there for the first time, on her soil, in her territory.

He looks much the same as before, except this time he’s lost his crown, black hair swept up in a bun and pinned back with a twist of dead and brittle vines. He’s standing placidly amongst her hyacinths, like he was made to be there, feet digging into the dirt, rooting him to her garden like he’s one of her own.

“I didn’t expect you.” She says, and sweeps petals off the sleeves of her chemise. 

“I did.” He replies, and his voice rocks her to her core. It is deep, soulful—like it held more than just his speech, but the combined pleas of others. It does not unnerve her, but it does something that she does not want to acknowledge quite yet, this time.

“Why are you here?”

He looks down at the flowers he’s trodding on, then back up at her. “Just looking.”

“Evidently not.” She scrunches up her face at the crushed red hyacinths, their petals shriveling under the weight of the death he brings.

“I apologize, Spring Goddess.” He does seem sincere about it, not reaching down to touch the flowers for knowledge of the weight he will attach to their shoulders. She waves a hand, delicately, and they sprout once more under his feet, crimson things of vitality and spring ardor.

“I can always regrow them.”

“I can see that, yes.”

“Why _are_ you here, Bringer of Death?” She draws her arms around herself, whether it is to protect herself from the cold or the sudden mirth in his face and what it does to her, she does not know.

“I am not the Bringer of Death, Goddess.” He sweeps a finger, and true to form the flowers do not wither. “I merely accept them.”

“Prove it, then,” she challenges. 

He bows, the galaxy of his chiton scraping the floor below but amassing no dirt, staying crisp and clean. He holds out an arm to her, a scarred one of flesh and bone and reality. She hesitates for only a moment.

She takes his hand.

Nothing happens.

“So you see—” he withdraws, and she makes no move to follow once more, although—once again—she wishes she could—”I am no threat to you. At least, not yet.”

Hawthorn blossoms fly off their handles, blowing over the unlikely pair like small stars in the wind. She considers him for moments, eons, the centuries they have lived the span of her judgement.

“What did you need, then?”

He looks down and gestures to the hyacinths, the cluster of purple ones she keeps in the corner. “Pick one for me?”

She does. When she hands it to him, it loses a bit of its glow, but he pays it no heed, simply content to have the flower. She looks at him once it’s done, studying his face.

“Needed to make an apology?”

He regards her blankly, then chuckles, his face at once both inarticulate and expressive, a dichotomy of a book that she cannot decipher. “Sure, you could say that.”

She purses her lips and makes to go back to work, but then stops, considering. She turns to him again. 

“What would you like me to call you, if not the Bringer of Death, O’ Unseen One?”

He stops for a moment, taken aback a little. Then:

“Kieran. Call me that, Spring Goddess.”

She nods, extending another hand towards him, this one on her own terms.

“Lauren. If only to not call me ‘Spring Goddess’.”

They shake on it, and the world is in balance.

Then, he vanishes in a shower of thorns, the prickles dropping like flies over the delicate flowers. There isn’t any extravagant fanfare, no smoke, billowing black and stolid grey, but it is an exit befitting him nonetheless. In the wake of his footsteps, cypress branches sprout, throwing off her organization. 

Dawn breaks, cracking like an eggshell.

———

“You’re not supposed to be here.”

For once his face is thoroughly animated, a show of displeasure and astonishment, the emotions wrapped like a single grape leaf bearing a gift of sweets. She looks at him with amusement, toting a bushel of hyacinths, these ones blue and white and—yes—purple too.

“I guess we’re even now, aren’t we?”

They’re deep underground, the domain of all the world that died shrouding them in darkness, if not for the light of the crystalline gemstones that illuminate spots of their face. She drags her white himaton across the wet stone, the one braided through with daisy leaves and freesia blossoms, stitches of purple thread unraveling at her bare feet. She holds out the bouquet to him, and he takes them in gloved fingers, gently, like he would handle the deeds of the fallen.

“They weren’t growing right, so I assumed it was you, pining away for more.” She levels him with a little smile, taunting, tossing braids of auburn over her delicate shoulder. He frowns, looking down at the fragrant bunch in his hands. They do not wither, but shine like the minerals above them, for all the world their equal in beauty.

“Thank you, Lauren.”

“Think nothing of it, Kieran.”

Then, having affirmed their standing with each other, she leaves him in much the same way he did, in a plume of apple blossom and dovecote. 

He walks back into his den, none the wiser. The hyacinth petals fall into the Styx, dotting the murky liquid with splatters of bright paint. 

———

Spring is ruthless, and the mortals forget that. 

It is beautiful, sure, all new life and fertility. But for all it gives it also takes.

She watches a baby bird fall out of its nest, breaking its little neck on the hard trunk of the tree below, and she cannot do anything as it loses its life, feathers not yet grown and soft down still fresh with birth. 

Then, just as she is about to cover its body in aloe leaves and send a prayer, He is there before her once more, dark hair wild and eyes like the ocean. She rises in surprise.

“I thought—“

He spreads his arms and offers her a rakish grin, his teeth glinting. “I am Lord Death, no?”

She frowns, then looks down at the fledgling. “Are you here to collect it?”

He regards her for a minute, then shakes his head no. “I don’t do that. Not exactly, anyway.”

They take the time to lay the bird inside the earth, and Lauren sings to it a hymn of gods, Kieran watching her with polite indifference. Then, walking side by side in the fresh dew of the early spring blossoms of her domain, she probes him.

“Why are you here then, if not to take?”

He does not say anything for a few moments, and as they make their way into a glade lined with throngs of dahlia and cowslip, he stops and whirls round. The himaton he wears is a dark, deep grey, the lightest color she’s seen him in so far, like the intermittent storm clouds that bring the showers of life, and it swirls around his ankles with the movement, upsetting layers of dahlia from the forest floor. Petals fall from the trees, displaced by the soft springtime wind, and they catch in his hair and land on his broad shoulders. She is struck with the urge to brush them off, to catch them in her fingers and press them to his eyelids, his biceps and knuckles.

“In order to take one must give, no?” He says finally, leveling his gaze with hers, though he is much taller than she. Not stronger than her, though—they both know that well enough, their positions, how they can stand on the same tier and not burn the world down with an overwhelming juxtaposition. 

She frowns. “I suppose that is so. But it just so happens that things are given everywhere.” She spreads her arms like he did moments before, a parody of his benevolence, hers rather cold in turn. “So why, O’ God? Why come to me?”

“I sensed your sadness, O’ Goddess.” Is all he says.

“Is that so?”

He points a long finger towards her, and the glade is divided in two, light and dark, night’s shadow and day’s growth. “We are bound by one thread only, and that is life. You cannot cut it, I think. You don’t have the power for that.” It is an accusation, a judgment of an equal and opposite.

She bristles, golden eyes matching the hue of the sun’s rays. “And I don’t think you have the authority for it, either.” It is a rebuttal as much as it is true.

“You insult me.”

“Give and take, no?” She smirks and he looks a bit put out, and that satisfies some part of her that is akin to him, a devil and a greedy, guilty weaver of a cloth of schadenfreude. 

“Well then,” he acknowledges, and he bows, the callous Lord Death genuflecting before the wayward Lady Spring, “We are tied, then. I will continue with your pain,” and he raises himself, drawing the creeping vines of the tree’s branches inwards, until the thorns pierce her as much as they do him—”and your heart. I’ll always come when called, even when you don’t want me.”

What he does not mention but she dully recalls, makes note of in the back of her head, is that a tie is not one-sided; that she will see his own folly, too, in time. As the seasons will pass, and more life will rot with the burgeoning of new, so too will she reveal him, unravel him and snip off the threads. She smiles at this, and it is not lost on him.

“What?”

She shakes her head, throwing a wrist up and watching as the dahlia flowers move at her command—”I suppose then, that you will see more of me in the time to come,” she bows in a deference not dissimilar to his,“my little misfortune.”

“I eagerly await it.” He says, and she is appalled by how much it affects her to hear his sincerity.

“Well then, my bothersome shadow,” and she is almost gone, thrown into the season of her own, “we have an agreement.”

“I can’t promise that I won’t intrude upon you greatly.”

“Likewise, Kieran.”

“Then an agreement it is, Lauren.”

And so it begins, the drama of death and rebirth in the game of life. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


_3\. Summer_

  
  
  
  
  
  


Tristan catches her in the garden as the summer heat cuts open and begins to bleed.

“You’re distracted.”

She looks up from where she’s been staring at the early summer blossoms, the lilacs and lupin, only registering the haunting lavender color. It’s been a while since she’s seen Kieran—not since the day they agreed to continue dancing their oppressive waltz. She wonders if his hyacinth supply is low, if the ones she gave him a season ago have wilted in his domain where nothing grows, wonders if instead of calling him to her she should descend to meet him like she did when she still had an upper hand, purple gifts in hand, apologies for leaving him wanting.

She shakes her head. “No, I am not, I don’t think.”

Tristan frowns but says nothing more, returning to the temple to pray for the autumn’s harvest, figs dropping from the trees above, splattering their seeds on the ground. She looks back out to the sprawling forest, wondering if she should make the venture to her other half’s side. 

For now, she decides against it, plucking the leaves from the lilacs that she judges will harm them as they grow. She tries to not look towards the hyacinths, worried that the sight of it will call him to her, and then she will have to experience the falling sensation she loathes to possess when she sees him unexpectedly.

———

Bella passes him more scrolls, snakes tied to her wrists.

“You’re not doing your job.”

He looks up from where his neck is bent, the qualms of the dead before him. He’s not sure what he means, but then she clarifies for him, a palm on the table, nails glinting with magic and fool’s gold.

“You radiate life. How is that, Lord Death?”

He frowns, not wanting to start with her. He knows she can twist his words like no other can, make it seem like he is the fool here, there, whenever. But he gives her his time, falling back in his chair and shrugging. He is generous, and the God of the Underworld listens to his subjects no matter how much they hate him so.

“I’m not sure what you mean.” He gestures to the rapidly increasing piles of scrolls, those mapping out the lives of mortals he’d had no previous thought for. “We’re running smoothly.”

“That isn’t it, Unseen One.”

“Belladonna.”

She points to the cup of hyacinths he’s kept on his mantle. They are worn, yes, a season’s worth of age on them, but they are not the dead, withered things every other living being is in his realm, and she notices this, because it is too apparent, even to him.

“There is too much life here, God of Death.” She crosses her arms, black peplos running down her lithe form like the waterfalls outside. “If I didn’t know any better I’d say you and fertility have agreed to a truce.”

He grits his teeth. “You are dismissed. I don’t want to see you within the hour.”

She shrugs elegantly and turns on her heel, golden vipers trailing with her footsteps. Kieran huffs and leans back in his chair, eyeing the bouquet with distaste.

They look fragile, weak, and for a moment he has the urge to call upon her, bring her life into his home and force her to grow more, the purple flowers dancing their sorrowful tune behind his eyelids when he sleeps at night. He imagines her red hair, harsher than the impending sunset but no less striking, braided to thick with ferns and purple heather, her golden eyes dancing as she resurrects the fauna of spring. 

He cannot count the days since he last saw her, down here, where the dawn does not reach his bed, but he assumes it must be near summer and she is busy with her duties.

He wants to ask things of her that he cannot, because death can only go so far in removing all his yearnings.

So he waits for her to come to him, because he does not yield to life so easily.

And so the game continues.

———

The summer brings with it golden lemons on their short trees, olives of sour abundance, crisp, tart raspberries, and there they meet again, under a splatter of stars.

“You’re out late.”

She whirls on him, fruit in hand and in a yellow bowl, and watches as he climbs the rocks separating them to descend to her level, a God such as him needing to travel miles upon miles of unspoken silence. She smiles, and it is frighteningly easy to fall back into the exchange they partook in seemingly centuries ago. 

“I was hungry.”

“Evidently.” He looks down at the little red clusters she holds in the cracked clay pot. “Anything good?”

She shrugs. “Haven’t tried.”

They sit on a rock under the moon and pick them out of the bowl, studying them and swatting the little gnats that burrow under their skins before popping them in their mouths. They savor the taste of the fresh summer fruit, and it is like they’ve drunk wine—their tongues loosen. 

“I came because you called.”

“I do _not_ recall doing that.” She looks at him sardonically, squishing a berry between her fingers so that the pulp runs down her wrist. 

“You did, I think. I heard it. And you know you cannot deceive me.” 

He leans back, and Lauren is hit not for the first time with an unexplainable _yearning._ His eyes catch in the light and create a mosaic of gemstones, like the ones he’s crafted and laid in his underground domain, where there is no illumination of the Sun God to shine upon him. She wonders, through the haze of wanting, if he did exactly that so he could look at the stars sometimes too. His hair falls, loose this time, not done up in any manner, spilling like rivulets down his chiseled shoulders, thorns barely visible in the dark mass of bangs. She wants—

She does _not_ need death. She is life, after all, and what would she have need of him for?

But she cannot deny herself that yes, a part of her wants him because it is the course of this world for all living beings to fall into his arms eventually.

“Ok.”

He turns to her in surprise, and she resists the urge to brush the hair from his face, drawing her knees up her chest and fisting her white peplos in embarrassment. “Perhaps I did,” she admits.

He smiles, softly, too gently. “That’s the thing, see—I don’t exactly know why.”

She stares up at the stars, then down at the bowl of raspberries between them.

“I couldn’t eat them all.”

He pauses, then throws his head back and laughs, and it is throaty and raw, real and warm.

“You _liar!”_

“Are you questioning my integrity, Lord Death?”

“Indeed, I might be.”

“You do remember I can tell when you lie too, right?” She gestures between them. “We are bound, and bonds are double-sided, O’ God of Death.”

He stops a little at that, looking at her in the eye. She notices how, when he takes a red berry in his fist and crushes it, opening the blood red star it makes on his hand and showing it to the world, that the fruit does not wither in his wake.

Perhaps Lord Death is slacking, after all.

“I suppose I shall have to be careful, then.”

———

He leaves to go back as the day breaks, a purple hyacinth in hand, stained with raspberry juice, and when she enters her garden again Tristan is there, all fury and black rain.

“Do _not_ associate with _him.”_

“Why—?”

_“You know._ He won’t bring anything good here, he’s—”

“Not like that.”

“ _Excuse_ me?!”

“He isn’t like that.” And she must keep her voice calm and level, lest He sense her distress and appear in a torrent of smoke and black plumage. The fig blossoms are near dying on the trees.

She turns and exits the garden and runs into the woods, but not before she hears Tristan shout her name into the burgeoning ivy and piles of larkspur.

  
  
  


  
  


_4\. Autumn; The Fall_

  
  
  
  
  


They walk in the multicolored leaves, in a clearing parallel to the one from spring. His chiton is nearing the soft grey of rain clouds, and her peplos matches. The reds and oranges crunch underneath their bare feet, soaking them up to their ankles in dew.

“It’s come time, then.” He nods backwards, towards Tristan’s wheat fields.

“Indeed. He’s stressed, obviously, so I am too.” She worries her bottom lip, and he doesn’t know how he feels about it.

“The barley is fine, I think—it’s the others that are concerning me.” She looks at him. 

“I do hope it will be alright.”

“Thank you.”

A bird titters above, the last straggler before the canopy of its sanctuary descends. Kieran kicks the remnants from the ground subconsciously, throwing the leaves into the air like the petals of two seasons ago.

He hears a surprised gasp, soft and unbidden, and then slight, joyous laughter. He turns in astonishment to see her, a blush of rose on her cheeks and light in her amber gaze, and she follows his lead, striking the earth with her legs like a small child would.

He is struck with much the same fire as her summer; he is plagued with the inexplicable feeling of desire, of wanting to twine himself with her so that death and rebirth are one in the same thing, no distinction needed to find itself. He wants to place a crown of thread and bone upon her head and make her rule the part of him that he did not know existed.

But he quells this, because he knows she’ll feel it, eventually, and be turned away by the smell of rot. 

So they stand, before the Fall.

———

Bella eyes him cautiously as he looks with barely concealed regret at the scrolls in his hand, all pointing the same direction: the fields.

“You know what we have to do.”

He does. 

He rises, taking up his mantle.

“I’ll see to it.”

The hyacinths stand still.

———

She’s here uninvited again, but this time it is wholly unwelcome, with the look she bears in her eyes.

She stands him down in his own home, all fury and utter rage. 

“You _knew._ Didn’t you?”

She throws up her hands. He _does_ know—the charred remains of a failed harvest dripping off of her fingertips.

“You knew what would happen. Hell—” She points accusingly at the piles upon piles of scrolls, all death sentences, the lot of them, all the mortals that fell into his palms at the lack of food he allowed.

“I _didn’t—”_

_“Liar. Filthy liar.”_ She growls, and it reminds him of Cerberus, multiple mouths filled with sharp, dripping teeth.

He makes to move towards her, his inky black tunic swaying dangerously, to grasp at her neck and show her the way he schools the others he commands, but she isn’t that, and sees it as nothing more than death reaching to stifle life. She grabs her wrists, her throat, and twists away, hurried, dry white roses blooming anxiously underneath her, matching her himaton.

“Do not _touch_ me.” She spits. “Never again. Do _not._ ”

He shakes his head. “You knew too, didn’t you.” It’s not a question.

_“Stop—“_

“No.” He is not shouting, but he raises his voice still, all his import converging into one. “You saw it, it was inevitable, because you are Spring and I am Death.” He seethes, smiling as he does so at her face, looking as if she’s been doused in freezing water. 

“You _hypocrite.”_

She startles, reeling, then sneers, a curling, ugly smile on her face, a satirical version of the other ones she graced him with. He finds it in him to not miss them, those things that gave him some joy.

“You’re a _monster,_ Lord Death.”

It is his turn to be slapped by her words. He matches her hatred with his own, equals in all things, always.

“That I may be. But you will _never_ be rid of death, Lady Spring.”

“Oh yes, because that thread is still there,” She says scornfully. She looks around, searching for something of his to destroy like he did hers. She finds it immediately.

With a wave of her hand, the hyacinths disintegrate. She smirks, and it is cold and not anything like what he wants, and she knows him too well; he’s allowed her to figure him out.

Give and take.

“I won’t accept any of your apologies.”

And then she leaves, rose petals dying in her wake, as if it is her who carries the end. He is alone in his crushing despair once more, the one that follows him like the hounds he tamed.

He realizes swiftly, suddenly, that while he has thought he took all he could from her and never once gave, she does just so and just as quickly. Life can be severed easily, because it is a fragile thing of thin needlepoint.

———

She tries to regrow it all, attempting to heal, both from the sadness of the innumerable deaths brought on by the starvation, and the irritating feeling of betrayal. The barley sprouts again limply, but it’s not that great, because she is a Spring Goddess and does not have control over such things. Tristan helps her, but his eyes are cold, messages of _I told you so_ underneath his worn eyelids when he looks at her.

Was He lying? She _had_ known better, because her own was one of ruthless abandon, Spring knowing nothing but breaking and mending. But this--

He’d—

No, she knew that he knew and he’d known _her,_ because she’d let him into her garden and allowed him to sprout like a weed.

So she stews.

———

They cross paths again, because it was always inevitable. And that precipitant question, the one they always ask, now it is made real by hate.

_“What_ are you doing _here.”_

It’s not a question, but almost a command, her tone as shriveled and dead as the last moon’s crops, the ones he ruined with his wrath and uncaring.

He shugs and gestures out to the town past the mountains, which she can dimly see blowing smoke and running its course.

“Some mortals wanted me here.”

It’s avoidant.

“No mortal wants you.” 

He says nothing.

“They never ask for you. Why would they?” She gathers herself up, like a great oak growing in full. “You’re here to collect them. They’re all useless dead.”

“Isn’t that true?”

“It is.” And it really is. He knows this, but won’t admit it, counting in half-truths to veil his mourning.

“And what’s more, _I_ don’t want you either.”

He stops, his mouth agape, as if he didn’t _know,_ and she is thrilled that she has managed to completely derail him. “I—”

“I don’t want you here,” she reiterates, And she leaves him with nothing, not even a flower of indication.

Does it give her some sort of satisfaction to do that to him?

Yes, yes it does, but that doesn’t stop the flood of tears, crystalline things that remind her of him, even then, that when she turns her back on her other half, she falls still.

———

It comes, the chill.

It seeps into late fall as it always does, nipping at the heels of an impending snowfall.

And she is alone within it.

  
  
5\. _Winter_

She sees him over the frost, the thick layer settling like skin over the remaining orange lilies, and ignores him completely.

He pretends to not be bristled, pretends that the sight of her did nothing to him like it did when they first locked eyes.

He’s not a good actor, though. He doesn’t know how he continued with the play they were performing.

  
  


He sees her over the witch-hazel branches, and it is embarrassing, the way he about turns, and does not acknowledge her, or pretends not to, anyway.

They are at odds, and nothing gets done.

That is how winter works; it smothers in its destruction, numbingly depressive.

———

He takes a pomegranate and smashes it to the ground, because the tree itself mocks him.

The white splinters, spreading loose seeds across the gravel pathway beside the Styx.

Then, to his immense shock, she is there. 

She looks peeved at this intrusion, her hair wild and callously marked with blue irises, breaking apart and sinking to the river with agony.

“You—”

“I’m here.”

“But you don’t want to be.”

_“No._ I don’t”

She crosses her arms and looks disdainfully at the smashed fruit. It’s not broken evenly; a chunk is fractured like a crater, and it displeases her all the same. Then, she sighs with resignation.

“I felt your distress.”

That stops him.

“And?”

She sighs again, all torn with wanting and hurt with broken promise.

“It’s too cold up there.”

“And it isn’t down here?”

She looks at him.

“No, it is. But it’s not on my skin, is all.”

Then, instead of taking the easy way out, she walks placidly up the pathway.

The ferryman taunts him, plague mask fraying with age and the course of time.

He pays it no heed, hands scrabbling for the pomegranate as it rolls towards his counterpart, unconsciously and unbidden by him.

  
  


———

  
  


She tries to shelter herself in the cave, her only comfort the clusters of snowdrops around her feet, but she is alone and she herself cannot sustain life in winter.

Through foggy clouds of the air she breathes she shivers, frozen to her fingertips, barely able to move to rub her palms together desperately.

She is alone.

And then suddenly she is not, and she feels the warmth of death around her once more, carrying her away to some place she does not know. She _knows_ who it is that tortures her so, saves her like he would the bodies floating in his dreaded river, but she resists the urge to scream at him to get off of her, to not touch her like he’s touched the other parts of her life, cold and unyielding and still gently, with the care of an artist who makes his own.

_I’ve got you._

_Don’t fall._

It’s warm.

“Please.”

“What?”

“Don’t—”

“Don’t what?”

_Don’t move. Don’t leave again. Don’t hurt me._

“I won’t.”

She wants to sob, but it would have been a watery thing, and as such it is frozen in her throat like the expanse of a lake, only broken by the pick and patience of one who has sat out in the frigid air for long enough to snare what they want.

“This isn’t right.”

He hums in confusion, still not letting up, his embrace consuming and warm, too _warm_ for the Bringer of Death.

“You...if you touch me, I’ll die.”

He looks at her, reels back to level her with a stare that she would have called desperate had she not known him better. 

“Lauren.”

“Yes?”

And then, with delicate fingers, he takes a snowdrop in his palms, holds it out to her in supplication, an offering from him to her, when he could offer her nothing but death and pale gemstones.

Nothing happens. The plant is virile still.

“I don’t think—it can—With you here.”

She begins to understand, vaguely, but he continues nonetheless, needing to prove himself to her.

“When—we are—” and he gestures between them—”I don’t think it can—”

Yes.

“Yes. I think I understand.”

He sighs with relief, and his hair tangles, tumbles in the release of the breath he’d been unconsciously holding. 

“You said it was a give and take,” he starts, then pauses. Then:

“But that is double-sided.”

“And—”

“And I do not have the authority to do anything without you here.” An admission, the one she’s been waiting for.

That does it. She doesn’t care if it’s in the darkness of a cave in the middle of nowhere, would not have cared at all as long as he was there too, and that still scares her more. She leaps forward, gathering him in her arms, coriander and violas bursting from the ground as she finally presses her lips to his. 

His surprise is only for a fleeting moment, and then he is kissing her back, fire upon fire upon delicious fire. His hand snakes up her waist and ends up in her hair, possessive, consuming, and she moves down, down, down along the body that makes up all that is sculpted by flame.

They break away, panting, and then come back once more, because life and death will always meet, inevitably, once more, every time.

“You—you don’t—”

“You weren’t lying.” She leans back again, studying his blown pupils and flushed face. “You weren’t lying.”

“No, I wasn’t.”

“Good.”

She pushes him back against the rock, and they are one, as they always have been.

The thread is stitched anew.

  
  


———

When they separate, he holds her close and looks embarrassed.

“Can you—?”

“Yes?”

He looks sheepish, and some part of her that he has stirred to the top relishes in the impact she has on him.

“I want more hyacinths.” He turns to her, looking her in the eyes, yellow meeting blue, like a lesson in color theory, secrets unfurling like tulips.

“You cannot grow them yourself?” She teases, palm to his chest.

His laughter booms and resonates straight from his throat, his pulse. “We still are two different things, Goddess!”

“That we are, Kieran.”

———

They sit upon piles of snow together, hands twined like ivy under a thin layer of frost. They wear nothing but thin chitons, each a matching grey, like the soft down of a winter lemming. She twirls a hyacinth in her fingers, one of pure white, and he watches her in silence.

“Do you know how these were made?” She gestures to them.

“No, I’m afraid.”

“Well, they say the Sun God was in love with a man.”

“Hm.”

“And the Wind God loved him too.”

“He died.”

“You guessed?”

He shrugs. “I know death. I know that when two beings love the same thing they fight until neither wins, because they have destroyed it in some way.”

She nods. “He is the flower, immortalized in it.”

“Unfortunate, that.”

She frowns, then places the hyacinth on the ground, where it withers from the pearlescent snow clinging to its skin. He looks at it, blank face conveying nothing to her. 

“I suppose it makes sense.”

“What?”

“Love itself cannot be immortal.”

“Can’t it?”

They turn to each other.

———

Winter ends, and they must go their separate ways once more. Him back to his corpses, her back to her flowers and life.

When they part at the edge of the underground, he surprises her and asks for one thing, and one thing only: more hyacinths.

She gives it to him, and she does not need to voice her question, because he answers anyway.

“Something to remember you by.” And his grin is of the jackals.

Then he is gone, and she is alone together with her blossoms. But for once, she doesn't want it, doesn’t welcome it.

———

There comes a time where he hears of the Spring Goddess through another’s mouth.

Someone—came to him, of all things—and told him that she’d directed them to him.

When he asks, the dead man tells him that she told him when he died in her forest, alone except for her, that the God of Death would judge her fairly, and not to fret. Because he is impartial and just, because death is the great equalizer of all.

So he does—judge him fairly, and sends him on his way, down to the others like him, where the hyacinths lay. He does not pry the pansy flower the poor man holds in his fingers from him, hold it to his chest and call out to her, though he wants to.

Her opinion of him is marked in stone, carved into the tome of Time itself.

———

He once told her, long before, that the only things that grew in his realm were pomegranate trees and asphodel. 

She is familiar with the latter, and made them blossom for him at his bidding, but the pomegranates were odd to her, something novel. She didn’t believe him, so he brought one up for her, all eager. It was high winter, the sun at its apex in the sky, when he broke it open in a bed of gemstones, red and orange and silver.

She had looked at the two halves consideringly, and then declared that her assessment was correct. When prodded, she said nothing more than the simple fact that had come to her:

“They are equal, those halves. You should divide it as such, always.”

  
  
  
  
  


_6\. Finish_

  
  
  
  


Spring comes. Tristan resurrects the fig trees, and they are all rot.

He asks her if this is what she wants, this evidence of sin.

She leaves.

She goes down, down, down further still, until she cannot go down any further.

He catches her, as he always will, and the gemstones on the wall are nothing to his eyes when she meets him halfway. The hyacinths are still there, and he gives her mountains upon mountains of purple ones, all the apologies she will not ignore.

He asks her what she wants, if all she wants to take is all he can give to her.

She answers him.

———

He brings her a pomegranate, a red thing blooming in aster, all unfurling petals at the tip.

She takes to it with a stolen sickle, breaking it in two, the white binding shattering onto the rock. It shatters perfectly this time.

They each take half.

“Do we have a deal?”

She looks at him, considers the young visage and old mind, the one she is not immortal for, the one she made herself new to know in full. 

He looks back at her, the same assessing look on his face. They are equals, they are one. They are life and death. 

Then, she scrapes the seeds out, her bloodied fingertips nothing to do with her grasp on his heart. 

“We do.”  
  


  
  
  
  
  
_End._

**Author's Note:**

> me, waking up in the middle of the night in a feverish sweat with this idea in my head: ????  
> me, halfway through writing: ????  
> me, editing: ???!  
> me, writing the whole winter part: !!?!?  
> me, posting this: ;;;;;;;
> 
> Seriously I’m just that one Zac Efron shrugging meme rn
> 
> Hope you enjoy but it’s honestly ;;; 
> 
> This would turn into an essay if I took the time to go through and explain, so [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_symbolism) is a link to the master list I used to shoehorn in the frankly embarrassing amount of flower symbols in here ;; enjoy
> 
> (If the link doesn’t work just search “plant symbolism Wikipedia”)
> 
> Kudos/comments are pomegranates <3
> 
> Contact: artsofisha@gmail.com
> 
> -thumbipeach


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